


As One That Returns from the Dead

by bunn



Series: Fëanor refused the call of Mandos [2]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Beleriand, Elf Ghosts, First Age, Gen, Oath of Fëanor, Taur-im-Duinath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 13:53:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13215138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunn/pseuds/bunn
Summary: If you're desperate enough, even your father's dark ghost looks like hope.   After the attack on the Havens of Sirion, Beleriand has fallen under the hand of the Enemy.  Maedhros and his people have taken refuge in the woods of the Taur-im-Duinath.Set during the seven year period between the attack on the Havens and the arrival of the Host of Valinor.  This fits into the story told inQuenta Narquelion, but I hope it also stands alone.





	As One That Returns from the Dead

Overhead, beyond the black outlines of reaching branches and fading leaves, the sky was a deep velvet blue against which a myriad stars shone with silver fire. The Moon had not risen yet, but it would be a fine clear night. 

Good. The Enemy’s creatures preferred to avoid starlight if they could, though they could endure it better than light of Moon or Sun. The cold of the night ran through Maedhros’s metal hand and ached bitterly against the stump. He ignored it. He could warm it later by the fire, once this watch was done.

A twig snapping in the distance. A deer, perhaps, or something darker? Maedhros’s hand was on his sword-hilt. Celegorm would have known at once, but Maedhros had never had his instinct for the woods; had never spent the time honing his senses to the breath of the forest at night as his brother had. 

Another movement, then the faint outline of a delicate head on a long neck, barely visible in the faint starlight, light catching faint in a wide dark eye as the deer moved past, and another behind it, slender legs stepping carefully across the forest floor. The first deer could see him, he could see the eye watching as it moved. But it knew as well as Maedhros did that Elves do not hunt on foot with swords and without hounds. 

Only deer. There were still a good number of them in the Taur-im-Duinath, though perhaps not as many as there had been when Maedhros had first come this way, with Celegorm, Amrod, and Amras. They had left Maglor in command at Himring, with Caranthir and Curufin to help him hold the frontier, with allies in Dorthonion and Hithlum to call on at need, and had ridden south through East Beleriand, past Amon Ereb into the Woods Between the Rivers, hunting. It had not been cold here then. They had hunted joyfully through the greenwood, feasted on honey and venison and wild cherries, and slept under the stars unafraid. 

And now there was no more Celegorm, and no more Amrod or Amras, no more Hithlum or Dorthonion or the March, and Maedhros was taking his turn at guard duty with the rest, because there was no point standing on princely dignity when there were so few of them left. Every sword was needed, for orcs and trolls and spider-things, and darker things too, the enslaved spirits of the dead, were making their way even into the Forest between Rivers, far to the south of Angband.

Beleriand had fallen under the hand of the Enemy, and this time there would be no recovery, no rescue beyond hope, for Fingon was gone. 

Guard duty was something to do, now that they had lost everything that had ever mattered, and had nothing else to hold to. No light anywhere, nothing but the Oath and the oncoming, inevitable darkness. 

Left to himself, Maedhros might have wished to do what Fingolfin had done, and Fingon, too, and gone out to meet that darkness. Even though he had sworn himself to darkness everlasting, and could not hope for light beyond the Sea. But Maglor would not go into the darkness with him. Not by choice. Maglor would hold onto the stars as long as there were stars to sing to. 

What if battle were not the end? His other brothers had at least fallen swiftly. He must not be taken again. Must not let Maglor be taken...

And now there were the half-elven children to consider too. The thought had crossed his mind that it might be kinder to kill them than leave them to wait for the horror of the inevitable end, but he had not yet fallen so far as to choose that for children too young to understand what they were facing. 

Not until the end came plainly within sight, and even Maglor had to admit there was no other way out, at any rate. 

If the children were fortunate, they might grow to be Men, not Elves. They were taller already than elf-children of their age. They might age, and die swiftly, and pass beyond the world. 

It might just be possible to buy them long enough for that. 

He had set guards to protect them: three watches of six people each, within the outer perimeter and the fires. It was by far the most popular duty: that and caring for the horses, but it would be unfair to change the guards too often, when the children had begun to be friends with them...

Another sound in the darkness, a rustle among the dark trees, and this time there was something about the quality of the sound that told him at once that it was not a deer. Perhaps he had learned more from Celegorm than he had thought. 

Maedhros drew his sword, which shone at the edges with a clear blue light, and saw out of the corner of his eye Lanwion some distance away do the same. Something was scuttling through the trees, a concentrated clot of darkness with eyes that caught the light from the sword and flinched away. Spiders again. The oversized beasts were breeding in the woods now, and no device nor word of power seemed to keep them away for any length of time. Once they became established in a corner of the woods, the trees themselves began to change, to become twisted, dark and strange. 

He stepped forward swiftly as the thing moved, dodged around the tree and ran it through, and on the backstroke caught a second that came dropping from the tree above him, and with one step forward, a third that tried to scramble away from him on a tangle of hairy black legs. It fell with a heavy thump onto the dried leaves, and the wood was silent again. 

He raised his blade to Lanwion to signal that the danger was done with for now, and Lanwion saluted in reply. Maedhros wiped his blade, but he did not sheathe it again. A sense of unease was troubling him, like a cold breath on the back of his neck. 

He looked around at the dark trees standing still against the stars. Nothing... no, was that a movement? He strained his ears, but could hear nothing save the voices of bats flittering above the trees. 

There  _ was _ a movement, real, or imagined... Sometimes it was hard to tell. When you saw the movement of two redheaded hunters on tall white horses, and heard laughter far away amid the trees, when you felt Celegorm’s hand fall in friendship for a moment on your shoulder, that was only memory, clear and sharp as broken glass. Memory was not so terrible. It was so much less terrible than the future would be.

When you saw gold-wrapped braids and the flash of a well-remembered smile for a moment, that too was only memory, or wishful thinking, more likely. Fingon was gone to safety in the Halls of Mandos, surely. That brave spirit, wise and resolute, was gone beyond the Sea and would one day return to walk in starlight far from these darkened shores... He  _ was _ safe _. _ He must be. The Valar had sent the Eagle to answer him, once...

It was no bright memory or joyful, painful trick of the eye that moved among the trees. But that did not mean it was an imminent threat. After Doriath, after the Havens, after Thangorodrim and Alqualondë, there were more than enough shadows following Maedhros in memory. 

Lost children, slain kin, his own people with their swords raised against him... more than enough shadows on his mind. But he was almost sure that this was not one of those. 

And there was the Oath too, a darker shadow, fat with blood. But this was not the Oath either. He could see that in the corner of his eye, dark, brooding, but quiescent, at least for now... 

But there were dead spirits who had lingered in Beleriand and come under the Enemy’s hand, and surely that  _ was _ something moving out there... 

Maedhros stood frozen, eyes wide. The sword in his hand was dark. It could sense no servant of the Enemy close at hand. But the sword was not infallible, and there was, there was a shape there, faintly visible in the pale light of the Moon that was just now starting to peer through the dark and twisted branches.

Something about the way it stood was utterly familiar. A dark figure, wearing armour, almost black in the moonlight. A sense that was not quite vision said that there was a flame within, a flame that burned with the brilliance of the Trees of Aman. 

A face that Maedhros had seen now and then in dreams through all the long years in Beleriand. A face seen out of the corner of his eye so many times, seen in hurried passing at a distance or caught in reflection among crowds, and each time dismissed as the haunting of a memory. 

But this was not, surely, here in this dark wood, a memory. The face and form were solid and complete, although he had not called them up in mind. The armour was scarred and worn, of a pattern that he was sure he had never seen in life, and the light of this night’s moon shone clear upon it. 

Maedhros stood and looked at it, and that familiar face looked back at him, head slightly to one side, eyes thoughtful. Not angry any more, not even impatient...

Fëanor. 

Maedhros’s father had not, after all, fallen into Everlasting Darkness. Nor had his spirit fled to the Halls of Mandos. He had refused the call, and stayed, unbodied, in Middle-earth.

Maedhros found himself quite without words, caught in a desperate mingling of hope and fear and horror. 

There was a darkness on his father’s spirit, he could see it. But then, there had been at his death. A darkness that was blacker and more bloody lay on Maedhros himself, and on Maglor too: of that there was no question. They had called it on themselves in Doriath, and most of all at the Havens of Sirion...

If Fëanor had not been taken by the Darkness, then perhaps Celegorm and Caranthir, perhaps Curufin... perhaps somewhere far across the Sea in Mandos’s halls, Amrod and Amros might laugh with Fingon and be safe. 

Fëanor said nothing. He only stood, shifting a little casually, then falling into immobility again, as if he and Maedhros were standing guard duty companionably together. He did not speak. Perhaps he could not. No, surely that was not true. Maedhros could not imagine Fëanor without words at his command.

Maedhros had looked out fearing enslaved spirits of the dead under the hand of the necromancers of the Enemy. But this was not some stranger. This was his father and his king. 

Perhaps this meant they were now no more than servants of the Enemy and should give up on being anything else. 

Or perhaps it meant that even under the hand of darkness, there might be strength left. Here they stood in a dark wood beyond all hope, yet high above, the Moon still shone. 

Whichever it was, Maedhros was damned if he was going to share this wood with orcs or spiders. The children were afraid of them. Tomorrow, they would find the nest and burn it out. 


End file.
